Poets and Lovers: a unique collaboration

Sharon Bickle (ed.) - The Fowl & the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1876-1909, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2008.

By Sylvia Martin

Many nineteenth and early twentieth-century women writers chose to publish under male pseudonyms to hide their gender – George Eliot, Henry Handel Richardson, Miles Franklin to name a few – but the nom de plume ‘Michael Field’ conceals a unique collaboration between two late-Victorian Englishwomen, Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece, Edith Cooper (1862-1913). Bradley’s early single-authored volume of poetry was published under the name Arran Leigh, a pseudonym that was extended in the women’s first collaborative drama to Arran and Isla Leigh. But in 1884 ‘Michael Field’ was born and became the pseudonym for the women’s remaining prolific output of poetry and verse dramas. The later decades of the twentieth century saw renewed interest in ‘Michael Field’ by feminist and lesbian scholars, mostly because of the women’s intriguing private lives as ‘poets and lovers evermore’, as they wrote in one of their verses. Jeanette Foster’s pioneering work Sex-Variant Women in Literature in 1956 included ‘Michael Field’; Lillian Faderman placed the poets within her Romantic Friendship framework in 1981, which was contested by Chris White as asexual and ahistorical ten years later; while Emma Donoghue’s 1998 biographical study We Are Michael Field argued that the women were lesbian lovers. The writers’ journals and letters in the British Library have been the sources most consulted by scholars, but Sharon Bickle in her edition of 168 letters and annotated envelopes by Bradley and Cooper draws on a little-known collection in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, supplemented by a small number of letters from the British Library and a few held in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. These ‘love letters’ make for fascinating reading, providing new insight into Bradley and Cooper’s lives (particularly the crucial early period) and also into their methods of collaboration. Bickle’s scholarship is meticulous and awesome, in the true sense. The writers were highly-educated women for their time, studying at the new Bristol University College (one of the few institutions that accepted women as students) and their letters attest to their extraordinary scholarship, Bickle’s notes identifying the myriad of literary, biblical and historical allusions contained within them. Her detective skills are exhaustive, even to the inclusion of the note ‘Untraced’ when she occasionally fails to track down a source. Dating the letters was also a process of deduction and contextual knowledge as the women never dated their correspondence; some of the168 are actually just envelopes annotated by the receiver and giving clues to when the letters were written. Bradley and Cooper had many pet names for each other, but Bickle draws from two favourites – ‘All-Wise-Fowl’ for Katharine and variations of ‘Persian Puss’ for her niece, Edith – for the title of her book, which, like the Victorians who loved displaying their literary skill in puns, alludes to Edward Lear’s verse published just five years before the first date of the letters in the collection. The women’s pet names indicate their relative positions within the relationship, with the wise fowl (usually referred to by Bradley as ‘he’) taking the role of guide and the pretty Persian puss the softer pupil, but one who was not immune to showing sharp claws, particularly as she became more confident of her own literary prowess and less in awe of her glamorous aunt. The letters range from the women’s early life before their collaboration when Edith was still an adolescent through to the years after Cooper’s mother’s death when the couple set up their ‘married home’ in Richmond. This enables the reader (with the editor’s able assistance) to trace both the developments and shifts in their relationship and the development and manner of their collaboration. Bradley and Cooper lived together as part of an extended family from the time Edith Cooper was a small child. During the younger woman’s later adolescence the couple was often separated, Bickle suggests perhaps intentionally by Edith’s parents. As the protestations of love in the letters grow ever stronger and more intense, the terms with which they address each other change, eventually settling into a pattern where Bradley is referred to as ‘Dearest love, my Own husband’ and Cooper as ‘my wife’. The later letters become shorter and more functional as the women were able to spend more time together and it is in their joint journal, begun in 1888, that the poets explore their literary lives as Michael Field. These letters provide a rare and extended example of the workings of a late nineteenth-century same-sex relationship, revealing the importance of the language of literature and art as part of its currency. The 1880 correspondence - when Bradley is travelling in Italy and Edith is at home with her family in Bristol - contains many examples of female homoeroticism, one exchange occurring when Edith asks Katharine to kiss the statue of Ilaria in her tomb in Lucca Cathedral: ‘Kiss the perfect woman at Lucca…I have sent a pilgrim-Kiss; may it reach you in time to be pressed by your lips on her shrine!’ Katharine replies in her next letter: ‘I bear on my lips the marble of Ilaria’s brow!...I kissed her on the calm forehead, the tremulously sweet lips, the sweet round chin.’ The letters also reveal the operations of the literary collaboration between the poets, a process that Bickle suggests was ‘a fluid one’. In a letter from another collection quoted by Bickle, Bradley and Cooper offer a description of their method to Havelock Ellis, detailing some sections as the work of one of the pair and other parts as ‘perfect mosaic: we cross and interlace like a company of dancing summer flies’. It is apparent that if the collaboration started with the elder woman being the dominant partner, it grew to become one in which both writers contributed equally. In life, their relationship seems to have also been far from a stereotypically gendered hierarchy in spite of their loving naming of each other as ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ in the privacy of their letters. The metaphorical model of female fluidity familiar from the work of feminist theorists such as Irigaray could be productively deployed in a reading of these poets’ letters. At one point, Edith Cooper, the ‘Persian Puss’, complains that the letter she is writing to her lover is stilted: ‘I cannot write my love with this stiff unspontaneous pen. (Sharp mew!)’ Bickle describes these late-Victorian poets as ‘female urban flâneurs’ (a term usually reserved for male aesthetes and observers) and the letters in this collection provide a rare treat for readers interested in contemporary accounts of life and art of the period. They describe intricately and at length theatrical performances and works of art as well as the people and places they visit. Katharine devotes two pages to describing Henry Irving’s performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, how when he curses his eyes roll ‘their irises clean away into his brain, and leaves the eye-balls – a glaze of malignity’. She writes about a production of a specially-devised version of Macbeth that is a vehicle for the great Adelaide Ristori as Lady Macbeth. Such accounts are a treasure trove for scholars and fascinating for the interested reader. Sharon Bickle’s outstanding scholarly edition of these neglected letters about a unique writing collaboration that is intriguing and valuable on a variety of levels is a work of consummate detail. She provides an extensive introduction, copious notes, an appendix detailing ‘Textual Apparatus’ and a comprehensive bibliography. In a work of such density, my only request might have been for explanatory notes on biography and chronology to have been inserted between the letters to allow the reader to negotiate text and endnotes without having to constantly refer back to the biography in the Introduction. Sylvia Martin is the author of Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton and Miles Franklin (2001) and Ida Leeson: A Life. Not a Blue-stocking Lady (2006), for which she was awarded the Magarey Medal for Biography 2008.